June 04, 2018

Last Of The Summer Wine - The Complete Series

I was pleased to get the complete box set of Last Of The Summer Wine today. A while back I had been watching the DVDs, borrowed from the local library, sadly they haven't got a complete set. The box set has all 31 series of the show, 295 episodes on 54 discs. The show ran 37 years and Peter Sallis appeared in every episode. Peter is the voice of Wallace from Wallace and Grommet. When I first noticed this set it was £80, it came out last December, before I could order the set it jumped to £100, currently it's £78.99 on Amazon UK. If you live here in the US, they take 20% VAT off the price and then add the postage. I picked the Global Priority to speed them getting here. Not so I could watch them right away but so they might survive the trip better. I ordered them on Thursday and they arrived today, packed in a flimsy box that might have had a harder time surviving the 2-3 weeks via slow mail. Even with the expensive postage the cost was only $115. That beats the cost of the individual 2 series sets from the UK and the single series sets in the US by 2-300 bucks, maybe more. The only issue with buying UK sets is they don't play on most DVD players in the US. I have a multi-region player that cost $39 on Amazon and they play fine on the PC with VLC Player.

The arrival of this package from the UK, just 5 days after ordering, isn't the quickest package I've had from overseas in the last year. Being the LEGO club ambassador, I've received 4 packages from LEGO that were shipped from Denmark and arrived 3-4 days later. The last one was shipped Friday and arrived Monday.Why they are shipping them so quickly isn't clear to me, the packages were large and there were multiple packages.

I had a couple of damaged DVD sets with Amazon UK, I complained and they shipped the replacements some sort of quick priority, they arrived 3 days later. That was nice. Often Amazon's inferior packaging has damaged DVD sets, a couple DVDs were even stolen, or more likely, just fallen out of the unsealed package. The packaging is probably OK for local shipping, but the long trip to America seems to take it's toll.

Just getting a package from overseas is a more common occurrence today, at least for me. Back in the 80s I remember a girlfriend ordering books from the UK and it was such a process. If they didn't have a catalog, you had to write and they had to write back with what was available. Then you sent a money order or used your credit card. That could take a month or more. Then more weeks later your books would arrive. Now I can order in seconds and have the stuff here in less than a handful of days. This last several months has seen me order DVDs from Canada, France, the UK and Spain. I think it's pretty cool.